Is It Bad To Sleep After Eating?

Have you ever tried to sleep after eating a heavy meal, and you can just feel the food in your stomach sitting there making all sorts of quirky noises?

Last night, I went out to dinner with my family. Two chicken breasts, a plate full of chips, half a steak and a side of salad later, I found myself in my bed trying to get to sleep. It was around 11pm, I was having a really rough time trying to get to sleep with a meal that could feed two sitting in my stomach.

After that fulling yet uncomfortable experience, I thought I’d dive deep and find the answer to the commonly-asked question: is it bad to sleep after eating?

What Happens When You Eat And Sleep

The first and most obvious point is that there’s food in your belly that needs to be digested. But it feels like the two go hand in hand – what’s the first thing you want to do after eating a huge meal? Lay down and rest (I call this term making a “food baby”).

So unless you catch your zzz’s standing up like a horse, sleeping after eating is going to muddle with the digestion process which can lead to a mass of digestive diseases.

Gastroesophageal Reflux Disease (GERD)

With improper digestions comes diseases like Gastroesophageal Reflux Disease (GERD), a fancy name for when the stuff inside your stomach comes back up into your esophagus, which lets stomach acid to come up and creates that burning sensation that you may have experienced in your throat.

The bottom line is that sleeping after eating causes digestive problems because you’re not in an upright position which is the preferred way for your body to digest food. If you continually sleep after eating, it’s can possibly lead to a number of digestive diseases.

Sleep And Weight Loss

Let’s clear up this weight gain and eating before sleeping myth: if you’re wanting to lose weight, the most important thing is to burn more calories than you consume. Whether you eat all the calories in the morning, afternoon or prior to sleeping is not as important as being in a caloric deficit.

With that being said, the majority of people don’t have dinner immediately before sleeping. Let’s say that you might have dinner at around 8pm and you generally go to bed at 11-12pm. You might be thinking, “Well this is fine right? Roughly 3 hours for my body to digest dinner seems like plenty of time.”

The problem isn’t with dinner, the problem is with late-night snacking.

If you’re like me, you may start feeling a little hungry just before bedtime. After a long day of work, the last thing you want to do is to cook another whole meal – it’s much easier to eat something that doesn’t take long to prepare and satisfies your hunger pangs.

This usually comes in the form of quick carbohydrates and unhealthy fats such as chips or leftover pizza. These quick fixes are a sure-fire way to increase your caloric intake – something that needs to be monitored if you’re wanting to lose weight.

How Long Should You Wait To Sleep After Eating

So now that you know the disadvantages of sleeping after eating and the effect it has on your digestion process, the only question left answering is how many hours before bed should you stop eating.

The recommended amount of time is around two to four hours. This will give your body enough time to digest the food in an upright position as well as avoiding the feeling of lying down with a huge meal in your stomach.

Snacks You Can Have Before Sleeping

However, sometimes a couple hours after eating dinner, you’re still hungry. If that’s the case, it’s a good idea to have something light just to satiate your hunger levels.

3 Quick Tips To Help You Sleep Better And Avoid Digestion Problems

It’s not so much an effect on calories (even though late time eating is associated with weight gain due to excessive snacking) as much as how it affects your digestive system.
With that being said, here are 3 tips you can use to help you sleep better and avoid digestive problems:

1. Have your dinner at least two hours before sleeping. This will give your body enough time to digest it, and help prevent any digestion problems caused from lying down after eating.

2. If you’re wanting a snack, have something light like crackers or whole-grain cereal. They’re easily digestible by your body and are healthy sources of carbs and protein.

3. Stay away from heavy foods prior to eating. This includes foods such as pizza, burgers or any fried foods as they’re too difficult to the body to digest and are extremely calorically dense.

If you have any questions, just comment them below and I’ll answer them as soon as possible.

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